70008An online simulation of recovery from lockdownClosedFeasibility StudiesInnovate UKLifting lockdown raises big questions for towns and cities. What happens to transport and employment if restricted categories of people are allowed to travel, for limited purposes? If extended social distancing reduces public transport capacity, will enough people get to work? How long will public transport operators require subsidy? Will fear of public transport cause an increase in car use and congestion? Can future job losses be minimised? What happens when lockdowns are re-imposed? While forecasting is of limited use in these circumstances, we believe there is a strong case for envisaging future scenarios and rehearsing responses to them to find how to achieve the best possible outcomes, especially for economic recovery. The aim of this project is to provide a simulation to do this. Steer is an international transport and business consultancy, established in 1978\. For twenty years we have been using an urban simulation, the Urban Dynamic Model (UDM), to help clients understand the relationship between transport, infrastructure investment, employment and economic activity in their cities. Our proposal is to develop a customised version of this model to simulate how cities might recover from lockdown. This model would be made available online for anyone to use without charge, to rehearse how recovery might happen and how to mitigate the negative impacts. In this way we hope to help city planners, transport operators and others anticipate problems, test out possible solutions, and, using what they learn from the model, design robust response strategies for their own cities. This is an ambitious project. The scale of the impact of lockdown on the economy is huge, and tools to help achieve even a moderate improvement in future employment and business activity will be of enormous economic and social value. It is also highly innovative, for we will have to simulate conditions and responses for which little empirical evidence yet exists; for this reason we see it as a tool for envisaging and rehearsing future scenarios, rather than a forecasting tool. Putting the model online for general use is also innovative and technically demanding, but with the potential to generate widespread use. We do not intend to charge users, but to ask for donations to organisations fighting COVID 19\.